Stranger than fiction? Makers of documentaries find new niche

June 28, 2003|By Joshua Klein, Special to the Tribune.

As many veterans of film festivals will attest, great independent documentaries seem to outnumber great independent features by about 10 to 1. But in the theaters, the opposite is often true. From the multiplexes to the art houses, documentaries have a hard time squeezing in, and for every success, such as "Capturing the Friedmans," "Spellbound" or "Winged Migration," dozens of solid documentaries can't even get theatrical distribution.

Cable television and public television have picked up some of the slack. But in recent years, DVD has also done a lot for documentary filmmakers, with companies such as Plexifilm, Criterion and Docurama ensuring that great documentaries both new and old have a wider audience.

"We did a film called `Sound and Fury,' about hearing implants," says Steve Savage, president and co-founder of Docurama films. "There's an incredible deaf culture out there, so we networked through the Internet, and they showed up. They believed in the film. It didn't play a whole lot [in theaters], but it's been very successful for us. Every film we get we're trying to cultivate audiences and let them know these films are out there."

Savage has pointed out that documentaries have become a lot like traditional independent films: labors of love that are often more interesting than their fictional equivalent. "We've been doing this for about three years, hoping we were going to be there at the right time," he says. "It seems to be, not only when you look at what's on DVD, but also theatrically. `Bowling for Columbine,' `Spellbound' and all these great little films that are coming out. Audiences are embracing these festival-quality documentaries."

Considering documentary is still something of a niche market, Savage has had his pick of the best, ranging from festival favorites to Academy Award winners that might never have reached a wide audience. "We've gone after them in a big way," says Savage of Oscar-winning docs such as "Murder on a Sunday Morning" and "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision." "It's just a matter of taking the risk. Is this going to be interesting to people? Is this going to grip me in the way that good movies do?"

Plexifilm, which released a two-disc special edition of Sam Jones' Wilco documentary "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" and the essential New York graffiti doc "Style Wars" last spring, recently released the impressive "Hell House," about a haunted house outside Dallas where Christian fundamentalists try to scare attendees straight. The disc includes "The Devil Made Me Do It," the short film director George Ratliff used to secure funding. Obviously, the short did the job. "People are getting that there are great stories out there, and they're stories that would never survive a Hollywood pitch meeting," Savage says.

Documentaries are often attached to high-profile theatrical DVDs to earn them their "special edition" status -- often undeservedly so. Ironically, that makes it tough when it comes to putting together a special edition DVD for a documentary.

After all, you can't just slap another documentary onto a documentary, let alone a film like "Lost in La Mancha," about director Terry Gilliam's disastrous and ultimately aborted adaptation of "Don Quixote." Instead, the two-disc set -- Docurama's 50th release -- includes a bevy of interesting supplements, from deleted scenes and copious interviews to a nearly hour-long filmed discussion between Gilliam and author Salman Rushdie.

"It's been a challenge," says Savage when it comes to special features. "We're probably more akin to the world of publishing than we are to the world of Hollywood. Our business model is, with some of our titles, to sell in the hundreds of thousands of units. But we also get great joy bringing out a film that might only sell in the low thousands of units. There is always a challenge to provide as many features as we can under a sound business model. We're hoping to be able to replicate [the extensive `La Mancha' supplements] on some of our smaller titles."

Criterion all but invented the concept of home-video supplements in the laserdisc era, but they've been just as generous with their DVDs, especially when it comes to classic documentaries such as "Gimme Shelter," "Hearts and Minds," "Tokyo Olympiad," "Salesman" or the Apollo mission chronicle "For All Mankind."

A new edition of Alain Resnais' short but historic Holocaust documentary "Night and Fog" features a stunning new transfer, all the more impressive given the gritty nature of the shocking concentration camp footage Resnais used.

A tantalizingly brief radio interview with Resnais from 1994 is included, and the viewer is also given the option of watching the horrific film solely with Hanns Eisler's isolated score. The fact that a film as important as this one took so long to get a definitive DVD transfer is remarkable, showing that even the most progressive DVD studios have barely begun to scratch the surface when it comes to documentaries.